Why Does Trump Hate TikTok So Much?
From a zoomed-out perspective, it might seem ridiculous that President Donald Trump has spent the weekend making overtures to ban TikTok. "Isn't that like a dancing app for kids and cringe pseudo-celebrities trying to relate to kids?"
@pilot_pete
Also, "Donald Trump? Do you mean the guy from The Apprentice? He's president?!" Sorry, we zoomed too far out. The point is you might find Donald Trump's feud with TikTok to be, at the very least, strange. Why does he want so badly to ban a platform where a mom makes chipmunk farts?
@staceyinklebarger
Well, there are two possible reasons. The first is the dumber one. Trump threw a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that was largely ruined because TikTokers created a massive campaign to register for tickets to the event and then never showed up. It is speculated that Trump could be looking to ban TikTok as a form of retaliation, and while he's undoubtedly petty enough to do this, I don't think this is Trump's primary motivation. There's just more at stake here.
That brings me to our second possible reason. A Chinese company owns TikTok, meaning every user on the app is having their data sent to China. This is bad because only American companies should be able to abuse the privacy of Americans! U-S-A! U-S-A!
It's why there is bipartisan support for Microsoft's plans to buy TikTok's American operations. Still, this question of who should own whose data brings us to an even larger conundrum: Are we, as Samm Sacks, a fellow on cybersecurity policy and China digital economy at the New America think tank, says, "Moving down a path of techno-nationalism."
Is this one of the first dominos in a long chain of dominos to fall that results in each country having their own internet, and by extension, a possible inability to order Domino's overseas in the future? Is this the beginning of the end of the world wide web? (Country wide web doesn't have the same pizazz.) If it is, for once, this wouldn't entirely be the fault of Donald Trump. President of China, Xi Jinping has famously banned numerous American Internet companies within his country. But copying China's policies in response to China's policies doesn't exactly sit well as a response.
@pilot_pete
Then again, maybe the fewer people to see this video the better.
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Top Image: TikTok/ Peter Webber
